Prince of Peace (47 page)

 

Saint Gregory's is a neo-Gothic church on East Seventy-ninth Street, and the rectory is a large stone building adjoining it. When Michael returned there late that afternoon, the steady rain and the shadows from the nearby buildings made the place even gloomier than usual, and it was with a shudder of reluctance that he mounted the stone stairs from the street and went in. He didn't go to his room, even to hang up his soaking coat, because he dreaded being alone, but also because he had no television. He went to the common room, and heard the reassuring hum of Walter Cronkite's commentary even as he pushed the door open. But his heart sank when he saw that, even though the television was on, none of the priests was there. Walter Cronkite had been describing the line of mourners passing the catafalque in the Capitol Rotunda to an empty room and that seemed to Michael, suddenly, the saddest moment of the weekend.

He poured himself two inches of Scotch and sat in the big armchair in the center of the room that the pastor reserved for himself. He hoped the whiskey would dull his sense of isolation, but if anything it only sharpened it. An hour passed.

A bell was ringing somewhere in the building. At first Michael ignored it. But it kept ringing. The doorbell, he realized. Why wasn't someone answering it? Weren't there staff people? Wasn't there a duty-priest? But then he realized that he not only felt alone in that building. He was alone.

The bell rang again.

He put his cigarette down and went to answer it.

When he opened the front door, there to his surprise was the kid from the airport press conference. What was his name? Wiley. Nicholas Wiley. It was dark by then but still raining. Wiley's coat was soaked and his hair matted, and Michael's first thought was, Where's your hat?

"Hi, Father."

"Nicholas..."

"I hope you don't mind my coming by. I've been thinking a lot about things. I mean, when something like this happens, you'realize you better just go ahead and act on the impulses you have."

"Come on in."

"No, I can't." He looked up at the rectory. How unwelcoming it must have seemed to him.

"In out of the rain, anyway."

Wiley stepped past Michael, then Michael closed the door. They faced each other in the ill-lit foyer.

"This will just take a minute," Wiley said. He fumbled in his coat pocket, then pulled out a small packet wrapped in brown paper and handed it to Michael. "This is for you."

Michael took the package, but he was looking into Wiley's eyes. The boy seemed intense and alert, utterly in control of himself, but also brimming with feeling.

Wiley said, "You were nice to me, Father, and I liked you a lot. And I was hoping you'd visit us at the
Worker.
And then when the president..." He lowered his eyes, but only for a moment. "You were one of the people I felt close to. And I guess I thought, well, he'll never know unless I..." He shrugged and smiled shyly.

Michael felt ambushed, completely unprepared both for Wiley's expression and his own sudden, nearly overwhelming sense of need. Wiley had pierced it like the truest arrow. Michael channeled his feeling, his surprise, into the act of unwrapping the package.

It was a hand-carved wooden cross, two inches high, on a leather thong. It was stark and delicate. It was strong. Michael felt a rush of emotion. When he looked up at Wiley, their eyes met. When had he ever felt such a blast, like furnace heat, of another's affection? "Nicholas, it's beautiful."

"I made it."

Michael looked at it again. He remembered the kid whittling in the car that day. "It's just beautiful," he said. "I'm very touched."

"You were nice to me, Father," he repeated.

Michael looked into his eyes again. He wanted to say, I refused your invitation. I put you out of mind. I was afraid of what you wanted from me. He said nothing. Instead he put the cross around his neck. It hung at his breastbone. He fingered it. "I'll always wear it, Nicholas."

"You don't have to say that."

"No, I will. I really will. I want to."

"Well..." Nicholas smiled, he was so pleased. "I guess I better go."

"You won't stay? Have some coffee?"

"No." Of course not, and they both knew it.

They shook hands then, warmly.

At the door, watching Nicholas plunge out into the rain, the dark, Michael called, "Thank you. I really mean it. Thank you."

Nicholas waved. And Michael thought, This is what it's like when an angel comes and rescues us. No, not angel, he realized then. But son.

 

The cavernous Saint John the Divine seemed brighter then, but it was only that the pupils of my eyes had dilated. Our eyes, the "windows of our souls," in the nuns' phrase, can become accustomed to the most impenetrable dark.

I was kneeling still in the choir stall on the margin of the sanctuary, but the time had come for me to stand and go to her. Oh, Carolyn! How memory revived my worship! How magnificent you were! How bottomless your courage! It had been the great privilege of my life to be the awed man at your side on the day of our daughter's birth. Those were the things I wanted to say to you.

The sound of my sandals clicking on the floor seemed eerily distant, unrelated to the steps I was taking as I wound back toward the rearmost chapels. At the Lady Chapel I saw the Virgin Mary, hovering, suspended gravity, but Carolyn was gone, and I was filled with panic. Had I lost her again?

I turned and retraced my steps along the ambulatory. Just as I passed the arched entrance to a small room behind the choir, a sound stopped me a faint groan. After a moment's hesitation I crossed into a jewel-like baptistry. Windows high up in its tower admitted light, but transformed it, and the air itself seemed sacred there. The font was a carved marble masterpiece the size of a pulpit. Beyond it, against the far wall, was the casket, Michael's casket. I could hardly look at it. My eye gratefully came to Carolyn who was kneeling there with her back to me. She had a hand on the coffin, and that detail recalled a pose of Jacqueline Kennedy's. Grief choked me. There was no Walter Cronkite whispering here, and for once the comparison with the death of the president, which was the loss against which my generation measured all other losses, was inappropriate. This could have been the first death ever; that could have been Eve there, mourning Adam. But who would that have made me?

I approached slowly, as quietly as I could. Even from behind she was familiar enough to arouse a familiar ache. Had it really been a decade, a dozen years? Her blond hair, now riddled with gray, was pulled back and piled upon her head, exposing her neck. She was wearing a simple blue dress, belted at the waist. She was forty-four years old, but there was no thickness in her body yet. The sight of her curving flesh reminded me, though really I had never forgotten, of the dream it was to be inside her. Sunday afternoons, sex, the newspapers, Bloody Marys, cigarettes, Billie Holiday and complacencies without the peignoir. While pretending to idle through the
Times
I could watch her as she left our bed without covering herself to cross our bright bedroom—bleached floorboards, white walls and a ficus in the corner—to answer the telephone. Her nakedness from a distance was thrilling too, more exotically perhaps than up close, the thrill of the voyeur. I could study her body, her pert buttocks, her taut thighs, her ruddy breasts. When she had been aroused her breasts kept that lively piquant color for a long time. If the phone call was from someone she liked, she would whirl on the toes of both feet, a pirouette, and lift her hair from the nape of her neck and throw her head back with pleasure. She might signal me with a snap of her fingers, then put them to her mouth, meaning, "Cigarette, sweetie!" I would toss and she would catch. Her toned nudity was free of the extraneous and her movements were completely natural, musically natural, having neither flats nor sharps. She was as easy with herself in front of me as a model before her artist and perhaps, come to think of it, all the hours she had spent in studios with an eye on the nude was why. But there was nothing impersonal in my gaze, and I could study her for hours. I liked it when those phone calls lasted. When she finished and she came back to the bed I would spring out from behind the paper and take her. She would laugh and I would know that she had sensed my watching, that she had displayed herself coyly, foreplaying me.

Oh, Carolyn, I thought, without you I have been a man with no use for arms!

She was aware of me. I sensed the tension in her even before her head came up and her shoulders straightened. Once more my grief and longing took second and third place to panic; the panic of having found her. What would she say to me? And I to her? It was wrong, I felt all at once, my being there. I was no helper. I was no friend. I had not forgiven Michael. I had not forgiven her. I had tried to flee my hurt, but I had nursed it.

Slowly she stood and turned.

Her face was like wreckage, but her eyes did not falter. She looked at me directly, with that old resolve. Which then disappeared, and her will collapsed, and she shrieked, "Durk!"

She came at me with abandon, the way once she came at both of us, to hurl herself into that swimming pool.

Now she hurled herself into my arms. "Durk!" She had pronounced my name only once, but in that vaulted space, the sound hung over us like a canopy. And when her weight hit me, I absorbed it and held her. I was immovable at that moment, as a tree. "Durk!" She landed against my chest. My despair by hers was nothing. I had never taken such a blow before.

Her hair was at my mouth, but before I could look at her my eyes were caught by the sight of someone else, a figure in the shadows, standing just yards away, her mouth agape. Carolyn's shriek had frightened her, even as her appearance out of nowhere had frightened me. She was, I saw at once, a Vietnamese girl, about eight years old, and she was crying.

Light from a bank of candles flickered behind her. She was an apparition.

My mind leapt to what it recognized—that naked Vietnamese girl running down the road, fleeing blindly, running at her photographer with fresh American napalm bubbling her skin the way the sun bubbles tar, running at him as if his photograph would heal her. It did not, of course. Instead it scorched me and you, a branding iron, the fiery tool that told us and everyone who we had become.

And now I understood that this girl was Carolyn's other child and that in her Michael had found an orphan of his own for whom to make a home.

I
T
was the night of February 12, 1965. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution had passed Congress almost unanimously the previous August. Only the month before, on January 20, Lyndon Johnson began his own term as president, having won the office as the peace candidate. Less than three weeks after the inauguration, only five days ago that night, in retaliation for a bold Viet Cong attack against a U.S. Army barracks—a single barracks—Johnson ordered the first air bombardment of North Vietnam and decided to send two hundred thousand troops to the South.

But Michael was not thinking about those doomed efforts. That night his focus was narrower than the fate of Vietnam or the soul of America. As he watched the sky from the observation deck at the main terminal at JFK, he was thinking about the twenty-six children, all burn victims of napalm or white phosphorus bombs, whose plane was due in soon. This was the first attempt to bring Vietnamese victims of the war to America. It was sponsored by a Swiss humanitarian organization called Terre des Hommes which had already arranged for hospital beds and doctors' services in leading medical centers in Europe. In Vietnam doctors could do hardly more than wave flies away from the oozing skin of people unlucky enough to have been caught in a "hit" of napalm, and there were more and more "hits" every day. The gelatinous gasoline adheres to flesh absolutely and smolders indefinitely, leaving burns too deep to be treated in field hospitals and deformities too acute to be remedied without drastic and sophisticated medicine. Broken bones, ripped flesh, fractured skulls were one thing, but the little monsters with melted chins and no eyelids and charred blue skin and fused fingers were another. As the numbers of burned children increased and as more and more of them died agonizingly on the stone floors of the orphanages—cots, mats and sheets, which stuck to the wounds, only made their condition worse—even Catholic doctors took to administering merciful overdoses.

Now the Swiss had organized an effort to make that unnecessary. They hoped the initial evacuations would grow into a massive airlift of napalm victims, first of children, then of adults, to get them the treatment they needed. So, with no help from the U.S. government, Terre des Hommes was bringing its first flight of wounded children to the States on a chartered, specially fitted airplane. The Swiss organizers had gone through their Vatican contacts at Caritas International to find a coordinator of the effort in America. As you recall, Caritas was the parent organization of the Catholic Relief Service, and that was how Michael Maguire came to be standing on the deck at JFK that night.

Everything was ready. Seven ambulances were on the tarmac, nurses were standing by and units were prepared at Columbia-Presbyterian, Roosevelt and New York hospitals. Teams of some of the best surgeons in New York were scheduled to begin treatment of the children in the morning. At Michael's side were the Terre des Hommes representative in New York, a young plastic surgeon from Columbia-Presbyterian, and the former monsignor, now bishop-designate Timothy O'Shea, whom Cardinal Spellman had recently named as his auxiliary for the Military Ordinariate.

"Cold," O'Shea said. The four men stood with their shoulders bunched and their hands plunged in their coat pockets.

"What will the chill do to the kids, Doctor?"

"Same as it does to us. Nothing more."

"I'd think it would disorient them, their coming from the tropics."

"It disorients me," the doctor said, "and I'm from Jersey City." He shivered dramatically.

"They're late," the Terre des Hommes representative said. He was a Swiss diplomat, a middle-level administrator at UNICEF. "They would not be late if it was a government plane."